Charter for Working Group

The Routing Area working group (RTGWG) is chartered to provide avenue to discuss, evaluate, support and develop proposals for new work in the Routing Area and may work on specific small topicsthat do not fit with an existing working group.

Options for handling new work include:

- Directing the work to an existing WG (including RTGWG)- Developing a proposal for a BoF.- Developing a charter and establishing consensus for a new WG. Thisoption will primarily be used with fairly mature and/or well-defined efforts.- Careful evaluation, leading to deferring or rejecting work.

It is expected that the proposals for new work will only include items whichare not aligned with the work of other WGs or that may span multiple WGs.The Area Directors and WG Chairs can provide guidance if there is anydoubt whether a topic should be discussed in RTGWG.

A major objective of the RTGWG is to provide timely, cleardispositions of new efforts. Where there is consensus to takeon new work, the WG will strive to quickly find a home for it.Reconsideration of proposals which have failed to gather consensuswill be prioritized behind proposals for new work which have notyet been considered. In general, requests for reconsiderationshould only be made once a proposal has been significantlyrevised.

If RTGWG decides that a particular topic should be addressed bya new WG, the chairs will recommend the work to the Routing ADswith a summary of the evaluation. The Routing ADs may then chooseto follow the normal IETF chartering process (potential BoF, IETF-widereview of the proposed charter, etc.).

Guiding principles for evaluation of new work by RTGWG will include:

1. Providing a clear problem statement for proposed new work.

2. Prioritizing new efforts to manage the trade-offs between urgency, interest, and available resources in the Routing Area.

3. Looking for commonalities among ongoing efforts. Such commonalities may indicate the need to develop more general, reusable solutions.

4. Ensuring appropriate cross-WG and cross-area review.

5. Protecting the architectural integrity of the protocols developed in the Routing Area and ensuring that work has significant applicability.

RTGWG may also work on specific small topics that do not fit with an existing working group. An example of a small topic is a draft that might otherwise be AD-sponsored but which could benefit from the review and consensus that RTGWG can provide.

RTGWG may work on larger topics, but must be explicitly rechartered to add the topic. The specific larger topics that RTGWG is currently chartered to work on:

* Enhancements to hop-by-hop distributed routing (e.g., multicast, LDP-MPLS, unicast routing) related to fast-reroute and loop-free convergence. A specific goal of fast-reroute mechanisms is to provide up to complete coverage when the potential failure would not partition the network. All work in this area should be specifically evaluated by the WG in terms of practicality and applicability to deployed networks.

* Routing-related YANG models that are not appropriate for other RTG working groups.

The working group milestones will be updated as needed to reflect theproposals currently being worked on and the target dates for theircompletion.